The Best Laid Plans Read online

  Rhea Carson moaned.

  I was affected myself. Kissing her heavy breasts, having seen her handsome legs in stockings and without, my maleness was being geared for what the French call fruit d’amour.

  “We must stop,” she whispered.

  “Give me a reason,” I breathed onto her wet nipple.

  “We’ve only just met.”

  I kissed her other breast. “I could know you for ten years and not be any more aroused by your womanhood than I am right now.”

  “Are you aroused?”

  “Find out for yourself.”

  She put a hand toward my loins, but drew it back instantly. Her body grew stiff against me as she pushed herself away. “I must be mad!” she cried. She did not cover her breasts. They quivered naked in front of me as she lifted her hand and patted her hair in the gesture of the eternal woman.

  I saw that her eyes were fever-bright and that her coloring was heightened. Maybe she wanted to put up a front, perhaps she wanted to make sure I didn’t think she was a pushover, but Rhea Carson desperately needed bedding by a virile male, even if she didn’t know it.

  Naturally I was not going to fling myself at her as might an overheated schoolboy. I am a mature man. I have made love to women as a vocation and as an avocation. This woman wanted a sampling of the Damon technique, but I wanted her to know and accept that fact, admit it honestly to herself.

  So when she got to her feet and stood looking down at me, her breasts bare, I did absolutely nothing. We locked stares. She drew in a deep breath.

  “At least I stopped your hysteria,” I smiled.

  She blinked in surprise, then in sudden anger. She would not come out and tell me she wanted a love-in. She had to play the great lady. Maybe she even wanted me to make the first move so she could reject me and build her ego. It was possible; I’ve known women like that. Now I’d hurt that ego by as good as telling her I didn’t think she was attractive enough to bed down.

  “Is that why you did it?” she whispered.

  “At first—yes.”

  Her pride clung to the two words. “At first?”

  I reached out and hooked her behind a knee, bringing her down onto my lap. Her soft thigh felt my excited manhood. She pressed it while she tried to fight my arms that closed around her.

  “Of course, at first,” I explained. “But when I saw how attractive you are, it became for real. You know?”

  She knew all right. Her thigh was tight against me. Rhea Carson tried the haughty bit. “All right, but you’d better let me go. We can’t do anything about it. We have to continue our walking tour of the university.”

  “I don’t think we’d better. I might not be able to save you next time.”

  The fear glinted in her eyes. Unconsciously she softened the muscular structure of her body so that she lay soft and warm against me. I took advantage of her changed mood to slide her skirt up to her loins. My hands went between her soft thighs and upward.

  Rhea Carson moaned, quivering.

  “Damn you,” she whispered. “I should have known when I learned you headed that League for Sexual Dynamics that you’d make a play for me.”

  I came damn near belting her. Instead, I made her suffer. My fingers went to work under her girdle. When she gave soft little cries as she writhed and twisted—not to free herself from my caresses but to spread them over a particular area—I knew I had her.

  “Want to go walking?”

  “Yes—no! Oh, damn you! Damon, you—no!”

  She turned in my arms, threw an arm about my neck and kissed me with widespread lips. She moaned and panted in my open mouth, quivering in reaction to my fondling fingers. Her bared legs were wide apart, she was an honestly hungry woman.

  “What do you want to do?” I breathed against her tongue, then bit it before she could answer.

  At last she managed to gulp, “Bed me, bed me! I’ve never felt like this, all crazy, all shaking.”

  The hysteria was gone for sure.

  She was turning, putting her hands down low on me, gripping me, clambering onto my lap with her thighs open. I think she wanted me to take her right there on my divan. I am no man for hurry-up jobs; a woman is a fine wine to be sampled slowly and carefully, especially the first time.

  Her breath was coming and going right in my face. I had to slow her down before she got things too far along the way. My zipper was undone, her soft hand was inside holding me, trying to free me for her pleasure.

  My thumbs and forefingers caught her stiff nipples, pinched them hard. She gave a cry of pain. Her green eyes blazed down at me as she straddled my legs.

  “What’d you do that for?” she snapped.

  “Don’t rush!” I snapped. “We have all day. I want to enjoy this. I want you to enjoy it just as much.”

  “But I need it. I need you!”

  I kissed each of her breasts before I said, “You’re going to need me even more, honey. Now stand up.”

  She slid backwards to the floor. I bent and caught her skirt, unzipping it, pushing it down past her girdled hips and shapely thighs. As she stepped out of it, she was standing naked in a crumpled black girdle gathered about her hips that hid nothing of her dark femininity, while her breasts were staring at me above her downpulled brassiere cups.

  “Undress me,” I ordered.

  She nodded, .biting her lower lips, staring at my open fly. Her body was fleshy, but not fat. There were red girdle marks on her hips where the updrawn girdle bared them. As a practicing sexologist, I studied her body with more than the normal interest of a soon-to-be-lover.

  Her breasts were hemispherical, as are the great majority of breasts in the English-speaking world. Not for her the conical, the bowl, the elongated mammary of the rest of the world. In hemispherical breasts, the height is equal to the radius of their circumference. All this did not detract from their attractiveness; I mention it because I mentally noted it, myself.

  The area of the areolas is always more sensitive than the rest of the breast because the skin there is thinner, and affords a more direct route to the nerves which send pleasurable sensations through the female body. Her nipples were long when erect, an individual peculiarity not restricted to white women alone. The ridges of her areolas were of the prominent type known as tubercular.

  While I studied her body, she was undoing my shirt buttons, tugging my Hathaway out of my slacks. Her fingers flew to my belt buckle, undid it, began shrusting slacks and shorts downward. Her eyes widened in surprise at sight of my male power.

  “Oh! Oh, my goodness!”

  I caught her girdle and did some pushing myself. She helped me with a couple of thumbs at the upper girdle. It dropped and lay on the carpet as I put my arms around her waist and lifted her, carrying her like that toward the bedroom.

  She opened her thighs and caught hold of me, in a teasing grip, laughing softly, “My stallion!” She giggled, rubbing her thighs together.

  “You’ve been around, I take it?”

  She flushed, then laughed, turning to kiss my cheek. “I’ve been around. Yes, I’m not always the lady diplomat, sometimes I’m just a wanting woman. Like now.”

  I dropped her to her bare feet on the bedroom carpeting. She whirled and threw her arms about me, giving me the feel of her naked front. Her mouth was a moist invitation to venery, her tongue, as it flicked against mine, a silent voice that called to me imploringly.

  I pushed her backward. Her legs hit the mattress edge, she fell onto the coverlets. Instantly I was with her, drawing her nude body to mine. My head bent, my lips went across her hardened breasts. As she moaned and ran her fingers through my hair, I kissed down her torso to her navel, and below.

  Her hips turned and twisted. Her voice was a soft wail in the room. The hands that held my head were gentle, almost pleading, as they swung my face this way and that for her better enjoyment.

  When neither she nor I could wait any longer, she drew me upward and between her quivering thighs. She gasped, she shoo
k, her tongue licking the swollen wetness of her mouth, as I fed pleasure into her flesh.

  My staying powers in the love embrace are extraordinary, my ability to prolong the sexual act a physical peculiarity.

  I have enjoyed this phenomenon of a constantly erect penis a long time, ever since my boyhood and my first venture into the games of love. Some men might regard this priapic facility as a curse, because orgasm is often delayed for hours, if not entirely.

  The orgasm pattern in the male consists of four parts. First, the excitement phase, during which his body is conditioned to the coming orgasm by kisses and caresses. Then occurs the plateau phase, during which the generative apparatus is functioning. There is erection, a change in breathing, an increase in blood pressure and pulse rate. Muscles strut and the spermatic cord shortens. In my own case, the plateau phase can continue indefinitely.

  There is no third phase, as such, in priapism. The normal orgasm is the third phase, followed by the recovery. But since my body never peaks in the love spasm, I am empowered to maintain phase three ad infinitum. This results in much delight for my love partner, whom I am able to carry over the brink of orgasmic pleasure again and again, without a halt.

  A woman is constituted quite differently from a man in this regard. One or two orgasms, and the normal man is finished. The woman can go on in a steady stream of pleasure peaks so intense as to make her faint. There are attested cases in which women had a dozen or more orgasms, one after the other.

  As Rhea Carson was doing right now.

  She did not know about my priapism. All she knew was that I was damn near killing her with zon-zon. She wailed, head thrown backwards, she snarled with her teeth buried in my shoulder; she babbled out her delight and awe even as her buttock-play threatened to hurl us off the bed.

  At ten minutes past one in the afternoon, Rhea Carson fainted. Her body went limp, her head rolled on the crumpled sheet where it rested. I let myself slide away from her, I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

  I was worried about Rhea Carson. Our hours together in my bedroom had taught me that no matter what the rest of the world thought of my lady diplomat she was a woman who enjoyed life. Her aptitude to learn—as a test, I had swung her into the reverse supine posture, which they call oolund-poolud in India, then into the purushayat, where I lay on my back while she crouched over me—told me she was not suicide-prone. She loved performing mukhmuttunih on me, and having me please her with the French term faire minette. No manic-depressive can act that way!

  Why then had she tried to kill herself?

  There was no doubt of it being a suicide attempt. She had been standing beside me at the crosswalk as the car had approached. We had not been walking, just standing. And when the car neared, she had hurled herself in its path.

  She stirred beside me. “Rod? What time is it?”

  “Going on two. Come on, I’ll take you out to lunch!”

  “After I bathe?”

  She turned over on her belly, smiling at me. I clapped her soft buttock. “All right. Go take your bath. I’ll wait, then take a fast shower.”

  She got off the bed and walked naked into the bathroom. She did not bother to close the door; after all we had done, neither of us held any secrets from the other. She bent over the tub, running water into it. She found some bubble bath crystals and scattered them about generously.

  I stared at the ceiling and tried to think. I failed to notice her when she came back into the bedroom and began looking here and there in closets, even under the bed. At last she found what she wanted in the hall closet. An electric heater, fan-blown. She carried it into the bathroom and shut the door.

  I reached for a cigarette.

  “Holy good God!” I rasped, and leaped.

  I ran for the bathroom door, I twisted the doorknob, I hurled myself in. If I was wrong, I was going to look like one damned fool.

  I was not wrong.

  She had plugged the heater into the shaving socket. It rested now on the floor beside the tub, its coils glowing cherry red. Sopping wet, Rhea was naked in the frothy water of the bath, half out of the tub as she reached for the electric heater.

  If that heater went into the tub water, Rhea Carson would electrocute herself as surely as if she caught hold of a live wire. I leaped from the door toward the heater.

  I could never bend and grab the damned thing. I had no time. She held it in her hands, raising it to drop it in the water. Her blank eyes saw me and did not know me.

  My leg went out. I caught the heater with my bare foot and drove it through her hands toward the back of the tub. It hit the edge of the tub and slid down into the water.

  But my kick had been so powerful that I’d unplugged the heater as I sent it flying. Rhea Carson was safe, and quite alive. Alive, yes; meaning, not dead. But there was no spirit, no soul, nothing behind her blank eyes.

  I bent over the tub. I had no interest in her heavy breasts and their dark brown nipples, both of which were shiny with bath water, nor in her dimpled navel or her hips, or anything else. Only her eyes interested me.

  They stared up at my face like those of a dead woman. I caught her wrists and shook her arms. She was like a newborn baby.

  “Rhea! Rhea! Listen to me! Can you hear me?”

  “I hear you. Yes, I hear you.”

  “Why did you do it? Why did you lift the heater to put it in the water?”

  “I was cold. Cold! Freezing! The water was like ice.”

  I put my hand in the water and yanked it out damn fast. It was almost boiling, that bubble-bath frothiness.

  “The water is hot, Rhea. Just think about it.”

  My hands held her wrists, my eyes searched her face. Slowly, very slowly, color came back into her cheeks. Her eyes darkened to sudden understanding.

  “Rod—I did it again, didn’t I?”

  There was stark terror on her pretty face. She knew now all right. The knowledge was hitting her fast, and below the belt. She bent forward, moaning.

  “Why, Rhea? Why?”

  “I do-don’t know. I don’t!”

  I got to my feet. I lifted the electric heater and carried it with me into the bedroom. At the door I said. “Wash yourself. I’m going to take steps this doesn’t happen to you again. And leave the door open this time.”

  I didn’t want her drowning herself.

  I began dialing the telephone, but I kept staring into the bathroom to make sure my lady diplomat didn’t try any more stunts. My ear waited for the telltale voice.

  “Hello? Who’s there?”

  I knew that gruff voice better than I knew my own. It belonged to my Chief of Operations, the man who sent me out across the world whenever the Thaddeus X. Coxe Foundation decided a Coxeman was needed to keep the forces of law and order intact. Or when somebody high up wanted to do just the opposite.

  Ever since Walrus-moustache had practically kidnapped me and talked me into taking part in what later became known as The Berlin Wall Affair, I have been leading a double life. I have become expert in judo, karate and savate. I have been a secret agent in almost any country you can name. I have killed, I have stolen, I have discovered I am a damn good shot with a rifle or a revolver.

  In short, I am two men: a professor and a paid professional spy.

  Every once in a while I start the action.

  Like now.

  I talked fast. Walrus-moustache can listen when he must, when he understands that things are serious. He asked a couple of pertinent questions, and I could almost see his shaggy-haired head nodding at my answers.

  Then: “Hold the fort, Professor. I’m on my way. I may be delayed a bit because I want Doc Thayer to come along with me.”

  Doctor Clinton Thayer was a neurosurgeon, one of the most brilliant in the world. He was at the university to give a series of lectures during the next week. I don’t know how Walrus-moustache expected to get him to drop everything and come along, but I’d long ago given up wondering how Old Handlebars did it.

  I
just sat there staring at Rhea Carson in the bathtub after I put down the phone. Until she got out of the tub, that is, and reached for a bath towel. Then I went into the bathroom and dried her down.

  My voice clued her in on what I had done, while my hands went over her soft flesh with the Cannon. She was annoyed at first, but only on the surface. Deep down, she was damn happy the decision had been taken out of her hands.

  “He’ll think I’m crazy!” she wailed.

  “Then a psychiatrist will cure you.”

  Her smile was rueful. “I suppose you’re right. Though it isn’t every day I face up to the problem of whether I’m going mad or not.”

  “Maybe you aren’t going mad. Maybe there’s another explanation,” I commented.

  “Like what?” she demanded.

  That one, I couldn’t answer.

  I managed to get her into her brassiere, blouse and skirt before Old Handlebars rang my doorbell. We did not bother with the girdle and her stockings. I had the feeling Thayer would order her into the university hospital, and she wouldn’t need underwear there.

  I also fed her three martinis. I had two myself.

  Walrus-moustache bulked big in the doorway, his face serious, almost drawn. Just beyond him a stocky man with balding head and graying hair was fiddling with his tie. Doctor Clinton Thayer. At first glance, his face appeared to have an abstracted look, as though he dreamed on other worlds. Later I was to understand that his mind was always active, that he could think three different thoughts and speak a fourth all at the same time.

  Rhea seemed shy as they came into the living room. Walrus-moustache bowed politely and introduced the doctor. Then he settled down in a big wing chair.

  “You must think I’m a nut,” Rhea said to the doctor. “I’d never have bothered you. Professor Damon was worried, though, and he did the phoning.”

  “May I touch your head, Mrs. Carson?” Thayer asked.

  She looked the surprise I felt, but she nodded and half turned her pretty face away. The doctor put his hands on her head, feeling all over it. Twice he nodded, then a jerk of his head drew Walrus-moustache out of the chair.